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The Real Challenge for Reform Conservatism

January 30, 2014 4:37 pmJanuary 30, 2014 4:37 pm

I wrote a post last week about whether a conservative reform project would necessitate a return to Bush-era deficit spending, or whether there’s any space available between “deficits don’t matter” Republicanism and Tea Party-era austerity. Since then, a number of writers have looked at the emerging conservative policy blueprints — which now include, mirabile dictu, an actual health care reform proposal! — and argued that their core weaknesses is an unwillingness to endorse new spending. Thus Danny Vinik, in a fair-minded post for Business Insider:

But the road to creating a reformed Republican policy platform is a long one. It cannot begin by suddenly disavowing everything the party has stood for the past few years – namely cutting the deficit. Lee’s tax reform plan and Rubio’s antipoverty agenda are revenue-neutral for precisely that reason. That’s why you’re unlikely to see any major new spending initiatives, even if … coupled with long-term entitlement reform – something both parties are reluctant to specify since neither wants to risk alienating voters … That’s also why you shouldn’t expect radical policy platforms that involve massive infrastructure spending or an increase in the EITC.

The reality is that a whole bunch of forces are converging to put a larger share of economic growth into the hands of a smaller number of people. The idea of “interfering with market forces” can get a bit question-begging, but the point is that if you want to turn that trend around you have to change something. You can rejigger how the market works or you can tax and transfer more or you can do both. The good news … is that a number of Republicans are trying to think of constructive things they could do. Marco Rubio, for example, has spoken favorably about the idea of a more generous EITC that would make less-educated men’s work more valuable. But if that’s an idea worth doing, then it’s an idea worth spending money on.

Now note that historically conservatives have not had the view that it is always un-conservative to spend money. Ronald Reagan, for example, substantially increased government spending to pay for what he saw as a necessary military build-up vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. But if today’s conservatives construe “core conservative principles” such that money cannot be spent on any domestic social ill, then they’re going to have a very difficult time putting a constructive agenda together.

I don’t think it’s un-conservative to spend money in some cases, but I also don’t think that the “to spend or not to spend” question quite gets at the heart of the political challenge facing Republican reformers. The reality is that if you’re drawing up an ideal conservative agenda on paper, it’s pretty easy to have it both ways — to put more money into the hands of lower-income Americans while also sticking to a revenue-neutral or even deficit-reducing script. The new Senate health care proposal is a case in point: A preliminary (non-C.B.O.) score shows that it insures slightly more people than Obamacare and reduces the deficit, relative to current law, by $1.4 trillion over the next ten years. It’s a practical and ideological win-win!

How does it accomplish this feat, you ask? Well — it pushes people buying on the individual market toward cheaper insurance plans with much narrower physician networks, and it reduces the tax subsidy for employer-provided insurance more substantially than Obamacare’s Cadillac tax would do. And of course the political problem, as Donald H. Taylor notes in a skeptical post, is that these kind of restrictions and revenue increases could be demagogued pretty effectively by Democrats using some of the very same language Republicans have used to attack Obamacare. Whether this new G.O.P. approach would actually court more backlash than Obamacare is a debatable question, and the sheer disruptiveness of the existing law might give reformist Republicans more room to maneuver than some liberals expect. Still, various constituencies among the already-insured would clearly lose out under the bill, and their influence would pose real obstacles to its passage and implementation.

But note that this isn’t necessarily a problem related to conservative ideology: It’s a problem of practical politics, of loss aversion, of coalition management, before it’s a problem of small-government purism. And the same is true in other areas where conservative politicians are trying to experiment. Something like Mike Lee’s family-friendly tax reform, for instance, can happen without a huge expansion of the deficit and without raising tax rates overall — but if, and only if, the G.O.P. can find the money elsewhere in the tax code, through mortgage-deduction limits and state and local tax exemption caps and the like, which would no doubt generate some of the same kind of political resistance as the health insurance changes included in the new Senate bill. And more generally, as I suggested in my last post on this subject, a Republican majority that managed to pass some kind of substantial entitlement reform, whether to Social Security or Medicare, would end up with much more budgetary maneuvering room when it comes to safety-net reforms, infrastructure proposals, and the like.

So while there clearly is a purely ideological intransigence that has to be dealt with by reformers — a belief, common to some House members, that the party shouldn’t be doing anything except cutting food stamps and marching us back to the pre-Obamacare status quo — I don’t see it as the biggest hurdle to sound right-of-center policymaking. Rather, the big question is whether the party, in the name of limited government and sound deficit management, is willing to ask more of constituencies and interest groups that benefit disproportionately from federal tax breaks and largesse. It’s not whether reformist Republicans can spend, in other words, but whether they can manage the politics of rent-seeking more effectively, and find a better, smarter way to cut.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.